Philo is resolving the hermeneutical contradiction. He here
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regards the two stories as referring to two entirely different creative acts of God and accordingly to the production of two different races of "man."
15
Because the texts, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, refer to two entirely different species, he can claim that only the first species is identified as "in the image of God"that is, only the singular, unbodied Adam-creature is in God's likeness, in which context its male-and-femaleness must be understood spiritually. In other words, the designation of
this
creature as male-and-female means really neither male nor female. The verse "It is not good that a man be alone" is understood in accordance with both species of man, the purely spiritual, androgynous one and the embodied, male one. For the first, the verse has the allegorical significance of the necessity of the soul for God; with reference to the second, the text says that a helper is necessary. Another passage of Philo is explicit on this point:
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 | | After this he says that "God formed man by taking clay from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life" (Gen. ii. 7). By this also he shows very clearly that there is a vast difference between the man thus formed and the man that came into existence earlier after the image of God: for the man so formed is an object of sense-perception, partaking already of such or such quality, consisting of body and soul, man or woman, by nature mortal; while he that was after the Image was an idea or type or seal, an object of thought, incorporeal, neither male nor female, by nature incorruptible.
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| | (Philo 1929, 107)
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The second story refers, then, to humanity as we know it, and "woman" is explicitly marked as supplement. This double creation provides Philo with one of his sources for platonic "ideas" in the work of Moses, who according to Philo anticipated Plato's philosophy (Tobin 1983, 132).
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Philo's interpretation is not an idiosyncrasy. As Thomas Tobin has shown, Philo refers to a tradition he already knows (1983, 32; see also Mack 1984, 243). The fundamental point is that for the Hellenistic Jews, the oneness of pure spirit is ontologically privileged in the constitution of
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| | 14. Philo contradicts himself on this point in several places. I am not interested here in sorting out Philo's different interpretations and their sources. Moreover, this has been very well done already in Tobin (1983). My interest here is in how the reading given here enters into a certain tradition of discourse on the body.
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| | 15. For further discussion of this passage in the writings of Philo and his followers, see Tobin (1983, 10819) and Jeremy Cohen (1989, 7476 and 228).
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| | 16. My friend and colleague Albert Baumgarten reminded me of this point.
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